What we are doing together
when we say our home
is over rivers, over veld,
under the knotted canopies
that welcome us with red arms
is arriving,
plotting mapurazi
loosening the soil,
mopping up blood
with the soft dry blades
of forgotten grace. We
are promising
we will
long for home before
we claim it, laughing,
locking, changing grip
and clasping again
the hands of long lost
siblings we have just found.
We are calling off wars
that soured our elders and
betrayed their sisters.
We are switching sides,
Kissing cousins, swapping
our totems back again.
Tsitsi Jaji is the author of two books of poetry, Mother Tongues (2019, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize) and Beating the Graves (2017) as well as a chapbook, Carnaval published in the first volume of New Generation African Poets by the African Poetry Book Fund. Jaji was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and moved to the U.S. to study classical piano and literature. Her poems often evoke music, the sacred, migrancy, and ecological crisis. She is an associate professor at Duke University, USA and the author of a scholarly book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford, 2014).